Always an alibi for abusers

When your wife is found dead in a suitcase and you’re having an affair with a stripper, it’s time for some fancy verbal footwork.

Asim Amran initially told police that his 27-year-old wife had abandoned him. Then, when his paramour led police to the suitcase containing the victim’s decomposed body, he pivoted with the skill of an NBA superstar.

Well, yes, now that you mention it, he actually did stuff his wife’s body in a suitcase that he dumped in Oxford during a snowstorm. But that was only because his wife had killed herself because of depression over the deterioration of their arranged marriage, and he was afraid he’d be blamed — wrongly, of course.

The 33-year-old Fitchburg man was just one of three defendants who testified in Worcester Superior Court last week about the violent deaths of their wives or girlfriends, but he was certainly the most creative. And those on the front lines of domestic violence can hear in their words the familiar refrains of abusers — it wasn’t my fault.

In a nearby courtroom, Jamaal F. Dottin admitted that he strangled his girlfriend, Kristi M. LeClair, but blamed the killing on two standby demons — alcohol and anger. “I loved her,” he told the judge, during a hearing at which he pleaded guilty to manslaughter. “God knows I didn’t mean things to go this far.”

What God knows is unclear, but investigators were aware that Ms. LeClair was bitten and bruised and that before she died she had begged Dottin to stop strangling her. Dottin initially denied the September 2010 killing, but eventually confessed and was sentenced to 8 to 12 years in state prison.

Yesterday, it took jurors little time to find Allen Stilkey guilty in the killing of his wife, Lisa. The manslaughter verdict came despite the defense claim that Lisa was the aggressor in a vicious, drunken fight between the couple that culminated when she committed suicide by jumping to her death from a second-floor window. (She was “freaking out,” Stilkey said).

Stilkey also told the jury that he never hit or threatened his wife when they drank. The testimony was contradicted by a neighbor who said she twice saw him slap and punch Lisa.

But the excuses of these two men don’t come close to the fabrications of Amran. Prosecutors contend the LPN poisoned his wife with morphine in 2008 after his mistress said he must choose between her and Faiza Malik, who came from Pakistan in 2004 for the arranged marriage.

Amran wove a different tale. Speaking in a matter-of-fact tone, he claimed that his wife killed herself and he found her body. The next day, he put her in a suitcase and pushed it down an embankment in Oxford.

“I was afraid every finger was going to be pointed toward me, sir,” he testified yesterday.

Last Wednesday on Fox News, Dana Perino suggested that female victims of violence should “make better decisions.” The former White House press secretary was discussing the murder of Kasandra Perkins, who was fatally shot by NFL player Jovan Belcher, who also killed himself.

It’s bad enough when defendants blame their victims. Lory Santoro, director of Daybreak, said Perino should apologize for suggesting that the subjects of domestic violence are somehow responsible for their fate.

“I see it all the time,” she said. “People blame the victim, and it’s reinforced when men say that women make them do it. We need to make a strong statement that violence is a choice. People can put the blame on anything. But it’s never the victim’s fault.”

Lisa Stilkey threw a pillow out the window before she jumped. Kristi LeClair begged her killer to spare her. And I’m confident that, while Faiza Malik decided to come to the United States, she never chose that the man she married would leave her body in a suitcase, and later claim that the death was her doing.

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